This comment is from the designer of the flight control system for Eagle Eye. I was also the control station operator for all test flights so I know the entire history of this prototype. The take-off and landing shown here is manual. Automatic landings were later demonstrated as discussed below. Contrary to much of the information on the web, the Bell Eagle Eye first flew in July of 1993 not 1998 as is generally reported. The 1993 tests were helicopter mode only. Amazingly, the 1993 tests were conducted at the Bell facility in Fort Worth, TX on an old parking lot just yards from a public road. The FAA was aware of the tests but, in those days, the FAA did not really understand UAVs and did not have much to do with the industry. That testing in that location would never be allowed today! The first aircraft experienced a hard landing on test flight number 6. The swashplate flight loads were significantly more than predicted and, as a result, the all-electric actuators could not move at their full design rate. This caused an instability during landing. Ironically, a newspaper article at the time mis-quoted the program manager and reported that the the actuator “weight” was too low (instead of “rate”). Obviously how much they weighed was not the issue but how fast they could drive the load. Most of the one-of-a-kind electronics were removed from the first prototype, installed in a second airframe and testing continued in January 1994 at Yuma Proving Grounds in Arizona. Conversion to full airplane mode was achieved during this seven week series of tests. A Navy admiral who witnessed the first conversion to airplane mode made arrangements for the aircraft to be demonstrated at PAX River NAS in southern Maryland. This demonstration took place in June 1994. Over the next few years major improvements were made to the system including a completely new flight control computer and digital actuator drive unit. Autonomous capability was added if the form of a simple way-point to way-point flight plan capability. Altitude and airspeed changes were still manual at that time. These new capabilities were demonstrated in early 1998 at Yuma Proving Grounds under contract to the US Navy. Over 55 flight hours were logged during these test. Speeds up to 200 knots and altitudes exceeding 14,000 feet were demonstrated. Note that the same airframe which first flew in 1994 was used for this series of tests. Much of the internet video available comes from this time frame. By then the aircraft had been designated TR911. This is probably why so many sources say that the first flight was 1998 although the same airframe had flown in 1994. Following the 1998 series of tests, the flight control laws were again upgraded to include the ability to automatically land on a ship at sea. Many hundreds of simulated landings were performed in the Bell Helicopter high fidelity simulator which included a NASA air wake turbulence model that simulated the airflow around a small combatant ship's hangar and superstructure. A patented mode of control was included as the basis for the automatic landing called RIV (Relative Inertial Velocity) mode - US patent 8,014,909. These capabilities were demonstrated in the spring of 2000 at Yuma. The automatic landing algorithm is highly automated, even autonomous, but is not based on artificial intelligence (AI). Not only is AI unnecessary for such an algorithm, it is typically considered not certifiable by regulatory authorities. Generally an algorithm must be completely deterministic and 100% testable for certification. The requirement for the automatic landing test conducted in 2000 was 10 consecutive successful auto-lands within 3 feet of the intended touch down point. No more than 30 total attempts were allowed. Eagle Eye landed within 10 inches of the designated touch-down point on all of the first 10 attempts. This result along with the hundreds of simulated ship-board landings gave the team confidence that testing on a real ship at sea would result in touch-down within the required 3 feet of the target. The same week that Eagle Eye demonstrated automatic landings in Yuma, the US Navy announced the winner of their Vertical Take-off UAV program. Eagle Eye was a competitor for this program but did not win. The Northrop Grumman Fire Scout system, later designated MQ-8, was selected. Plans to continue Eagle Eye testing aboard a Navy ship were called off following this announcement. It's interesting to note that the first automatic shipboard landing of Fire Scout did not occur until January, 2006 aboard the USS Nashville (LPD-13). Had testing continued on Eagle Eye, a shipboard landing would likely have occurred later in 2000. Another interesting fact is that the latest variant of Fire Scout (the MQ-8C) is based on a helicopter airframe from Bell (although not a tilt-rotor). The TR911 aircraft shown in this video and which conducted all tests from 1994 though 2000 is now in a museum at PAX River NAS, Maryland. It is painted in Coast Guard colors although it never flew with this paint job. A later prototype, the TR918, was to be a Coast Guard UAV aboard the new National Security Cutter as part of the Deepwater program. But that's a different story.
I was the program manager for the Eagle Eye (TR911) decribed. I haven't talked to James in a long time, so here's a shout out to him! James was the best of the best. That was a great review but I wished you had talked about the TR918 which was a production sized aircraft with a helicopter sized turbo-jet engine in the 700 SHP class. That was under contract to the USCG up through pre-design. I retired in December 2004 and later, the USCG had some financial setbacks with their Deepwater Program and the full scale development program was cancelled, but not before the TR918 flew.
